The literature review is very often, apart from the initial proposal, the first substantial piece of writing that you are asked to do. For this reason alone, it is not surprising you may need to try several possible arrangements of it.

Focusing the Literature Review

However, over the course of research and writing a PhD thesis, you most likely will write the literature review more than once. As part of the process of trying to formulate their topic, some students write a kind of literature review which is often more like a survey. This could become more focussed as part of a proposal. Usually, once you start to work on your own research, the literature review takes a back seat, though you should systematically keep abreast of new developments in your field.

Then, once you are finally 'writing up', the literature review needs either a major revision, or has to be tackled properly for the first time. Understandably, it is only now after two or three years of close work, that the significance of some of the literature you've glossed over earlier might strike you. You are now better equipped to appreciate it and to review it critically. Also, your research findings could well mean that you need to explore parts of literature that did not initially seem to you to be of direct relevance. Of course, the opposite also happens and perhaps you will decide to exclude whole areas of literature now marginal to your research.

Organising the Literature Review

The literature review is not an add-on but is absolutely integral to the whole work. So, it should be written in such a way that, in the first place, within the context of the field, it should set up the reader's expectations of where your work fits; it should provide the justification of why you are doing what you are doing; if necessary, it should also establish your theoretical framework and your methodology. A chronological organisation therefore, although it may first suggest itself, is not usually the best way to achieve this. It is more important to isolate the issues and highlight the findings that are relevant to what you are doing. To get back to the question, then, the 'correct or proper way' to organise your literature review is the way you can best fulfil these needs.

Since there is no general standard or correct structure, you have to try several possible arrangements to organise it best. It is of course frustrating and time consuming to write the whole literature review several times to see which way serves your purposes the best, but there are some ways that can help you decide on the possible arrangement. Working with a diagram, concept map, or some kind of shorter 'story' (which is more than an outline) will capture the logic of your proposed organisation and therefore allow you to choose the clearest way before you write. Plotting out possible structures in this way also gives you something concrete to discuss with your supervisor or test on other readers.

Here is an example of using a story to plot the flow of ideas:

Two areas of research are relevant to the research presented in this thesis: A and B. I will first review the literature reporting research into x within A since it is directly relevant to my work. Here I will discuss approaches used to investigate x showing that the ways in which x is conceptualised can be elicited in many ways. I will show that they all give us descriptions of conceptualisation of x and assume that the different ways in which x is conceptualised result in different (but congruent with these conceptualisations) practices. Then I will show that the link between conception and practice has not been proven within this stream of research, although some attempts have been made. I will then talk about attempts to investigate this link (starting with S's study) and analyse the weaknesses of these approaches…